It is common practice in the production of plastic parts and the like to first design such a part and then painstakingly produce a prototype of the part, all involving considerable time, effort and expense. The design is then reviewed and, oftentimes, the laborious process is again and again repeated until the design has been optimized. After design optimitization, the next step is production. Most production plastic parts are injection molded. Since the design time and tooling costs are very high, plastic parts are usually only practical in high volume production. While other processes are available for the production of plastic parts, including direct machine work, vacuum-forming and direct forming, such methods are typically only cost effective for short run production, and the parts produced are usually inferior in quality to molded parts.
Very sophisticated techniques have been developed in the past for generating three-dimensional objects within a fluid medium which is selectively cured by beams of radiation brought to selective focus at prescribed intersection points within the three-dimensional volume of the fluid medium. Typical of such three-dimensional systems are those described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,041,476; 4,078,229; 4,238,840 and 4,288,861. All of these systems rely upon the buildup of synergistic energization at selected points deep within the fluid volume, to the exclusion of all other points in the fluid volume. Unfortunately, however, such three-dimensional forming systems face a number of problems with regard to resolution and exposure control. The loss of radiation intensity and image forming resolution of the focused spots as the intersections move deeper into the fluid medium create rather obvious complex control situations. Absorption, diffusion, dispersion and diffraction all contribute to the difficulties of working deep within the fluid medium on an economical and reliable basis.
In recent years, "stereolithography" systems, such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,575,330 entitled "Apparatus For Production Of Three-Dimensional Objects By Stereolithography" have come into use. Basically, stereolithography is a method for automatically building complex plastic parts by successively printing cross-sections of photopolymer or the like (such as liquid plastic) on top of each other until all of the thin layers are joined together to form a whole part. With this technology, the parts are literally grown in a vat of liquid plastic. This method of fabrication is extremely powerful for quickly reducing design ideas to physical form and for making prototypes.
Photocurable polymers change from liquid to solid in the presence of light and their photospeed with ultraviolet light (UV) is fast enough to make them practical model building materials. The material that is not polymerized when a part is made is still usable and remains in the vat as successive parts are made. An ultraviolet laser generates a small intense spot of UV. This spot is moved across the liquid surface with a galvanometer mirror X-Y scanner. The scanner is driven by computer generated vectors or the like. Precise complex patterns can be rapidly produced with this technique.
The laser scanner, the photopolymer vat and the elevator, along with a controlling computer, combine together to form a stereolithography apparatus, referred to as an "SLA". An SLA is programmed to automatically make a plastic part by drawing one cross section at a time, and building it up layer by layer.
Stereolithography represents an unprecedented way to quickly make complex or simple parts without tooling. Since this technology depends on using a computer to generate its cross sectional patterns, there is a natural data link to CAD/CAM. However, such systems have encountered difficulties relating to structural stress, shrinkage, curl and other distortions, as well as resolution, speed, accuracy and difficulties in producing certain object shapes.
The following background discussion sets forth some of the history in the development of the system of the present invention, including problems encountered and solutions developed, in the course of providing an enhanced SLA incorporating the features of the invention.
The original stereolithography process approach to building parts was based on building walls that were one line width thick, a line width being the width of plastic formed after a single pass was made with a beam of ultraviolet light. This revealed two primary problems: 1) relatively weak structural strength, along with 2) layer to layer adhesion problems when making the transition from the vertical to the horizontal. This technique was based on building parts using the Basic Programming Language to control the motion of a U.V. laser light beam.
Another approach to solving the transition problem was to build parts with a solid wall thickness based on completely solidifying the material between two surface boundaries. This procedure experienced problems with distortion of parts and with relatively long exposure times required. This procedure provided good structural strength and produced better results in connection with the transition from vertical to horizontal.
Another approach was based on using inner and outer walls as boundaries for a section of an object, as all real objects have, but the area between these boundaries was not to be completely solidified, but rather crisscrossed by a grid structure known as cross-hatching. This technique provides good structural strength and resolved much of the transition problem. It also reduced the exposure time and distortion problem. However it now created a new potential problem in that, what had originally been a solid object, was now an object with walls but missing top and bottom surfaces.
The "hollowness" problem was then approached by filling in all horizontal sections with closely-spaced vectors thereby forming a top and bottom skin. This approach had all the advantages of the previous one, but still had problems of its own. As one made the transition from vertical to horizontal, one would find holes in the part where the boundary lines were offset greater than one line width between layers. The original version of this approach also had skins that did not always fit as well as desired, but this was later solved by rounding the triangle boundaries to slicing layers. This rounding technique also solved another problem which could cause misdirected cross-hatching.
The problem of holes was approached by deciding to create skin fill in the offset region between layers when the triangles forming that portion of a layer had a slope less than a specified amount from the horizontal plane. This is known as near-horizontal or near-flat skin. This technique worked well for completing the creation of solid parts. A version of this technique also completed the work necessary for solving the transition problem. The same version of this technique that solved the transition problem also yielded the best vertical feature accuracy of objects.
There continues to be a long existing need in the design and production arts for the capability of rapidly and reliably moving from the design stage to the prototype stage and to ultimate production, particularly moving directly from the computer designs for such plastic parts to virtually immediate prototypes and the facility for large scale production on an economical and automatic basis.
Accordingly, those concerned with the development and production of three-dimensional plastic objects and the like have long recognized the desirability for further improvement in more rapid, reliable, accurate, economical and automatic means which would facilitate quickly moving from a design stage to the prototype stage and to production. The present invention clearly fulfills all of these needs.